Sea Shepherd Reorganizes in the Face of Challenge and
Opportunities

Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.- Walt Whitman

Report by Captain Paul Watson

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is on the doorstep of the most
challenging campaign ever undertaken in its thirty five year history of
activism and intervention. It is also a time ripe for opportunity.

In a month we walk through that door, a freezer door actually. More
specifically, we will take our three ships, the Steve Irwin, the Bob Barker
and the Brigitte Bardot southward from Australia into the cold, remote, and
hostile waters of the Southern Ocean just off the coast of Antarctica.

And it is there we will discover just what the Japanese whalers intend to
do to stop us with the thirty million dollars allocated to them by the
Japanese government.

Our small non-governmental organization will face off in the frigid
Southern Ocean against a ruthless and aggressive whaling fleet subsidized
and politically supported by one of the world’s greatest superpowers.

It is incredible when you think of it. Japan is treating the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society like a nation they are at war with. The Japanese Prime
Minster has stated that Japan will not surrender to Sea Shepherd.

A dramatic statement considering all we wish to do is save the lives of
whales from a horrific death from illegal explosive harpoons.

Nevertheless, they regard us as an embarrassment and have vowed to crush
us. With thirty million dollars against our three million dollar budget,
with three times as many whalers as we have volunteers, with more and
larger, faster and much more powerful ships, what choice do we have BUT to
return to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and resist them with all the
resources available to us. Our one great advantage? Our crews are more
passionate about saving lives than the whalers are about destroying life. We
are willing to risk our lives in this great challenge against superior odds
because love of life and love for this planet and her magnificent oceans
motivates our courage where only greed, cruelty, and pride motivate the
actions of the whalers.

Whatever they intend, whatever they do, it will not deter us. Our
objective is to save as many whales as we can in the Southern Ocean Whale
Sanctuary, no matter how dangerous. The risks are acceptable to each and
every one of us, and my crew has the passion, resourcefulness and the
courage to confront these vicious killers with the objective of shutting
down their illegal operations.

As Captain John Paul Jones once stated with fierce determination, “Give
me a fair ship that I might sail her into harm’s way.”

Before departing, however, I have decided that Sea Shepherd needs to
address a re-organization to strengthen our abilities to support our ships
and crews in the field, and to streamline the organization to keep it
flexible and efficient.

Since establishing Sea Shepherd in 1977, I have struggled to keep this
organization small, grassroots, and effective. It has not been easy on one
hand to encourage growth as it provides increased resources to enable our
campaigns to be more effective, knowing on the other hand growth manifests
bureaucracy with increased administrative costs.

Many years ago, when I was in the Canadian Coast Guard, the captain of
the CCGS Camsell commented how the Canadian Coast Guard had gone from a
courageous and dedicated force on the water to an agency bullied and
manipulated by politicians and bureaucrats. He recalled how in the 1950's
for every person working in the office there were forty people working on
the ships. A quarter of a century later it had evolved to fifty people
working in an office to every man on a ship or on station.

I remember the Captain of the CCGS Camsell wanting to replace a light
just offshore of Texada Island, British Columbia in the Georgia Strait. We
could see the light; see that it was not working and needed replacement. We
had a large replacement bulb on board the ship. It would have taken twenty
minutes to replace the bulb. The Department of Transport office in Victoria
told him not to proceed as an order had to be written up and submitted to
the office with a request for a replacement. Once the order was received,
the office would dispatch a Coast Guard vessel from Victoria to replace the
light.

The Captain was furious, but he could not proceed, and the light remained
out of order, a threat to navigation for three days until another vessel out
of Victoria some one hundred miles away was sent with the replacement bulb.
What I saw there was ridiculous and costly inefficiency and a threat to
public safety.

That lesson has stayed with me ever since and that is why the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society has not grown into a large bureaucratic
organization. We remain relatively small deliberately.

Over the years, I have seen other organizations fall prey to bureaucracy
and I have vowed that Sea Shepherd will never follow suit. We need to keep
things simple, small, and effective. We need to make decisions without
hesitation and we need to be able to act in the field by putting our trust
in our field leaders, our captains and our officers and crew.

Our Captains and field leaders make their own decisions in the field,
without fear of reprimand so long as they operate within our basic rules of
engagement and those rules are simple. Cause no physical injury to our
opposition, do not compromise with the lives of our clients and never
surrender from a campaign until the campaign has been won.

This policy cannot change in the face of growth and the truth is that
because of the success of Whale Wars and international publicity over the
success of our campaigns, we have grown rapidly in support.

We both need and appreciate that support, as it allows us to have more
resources in the field but we must be vigilant to the need to maintain
control of bureaucratic influence.

Sea Shepherd does not send out a small army onto the streets with
clipboards soliciting money from the public and pocketing a fat commission
for doing so. Nor do we believe SSCS supporters would agree to have their
donation dollars being spent on large-scale direct mail marketing.

People come to Sea Shepherd through word of mouth, through
recommendations from other supporters, from visits to our ships and from
watching Whale Wars or viewing documentary films about our activities.

We enjoy one of the highest ratings with Charity Navigator because more
than 80% of SSCS funds go directly to ships and campaigns. Yes, we need an
administration but we need to keep it as small as possible and when things
don’t work, we change, we adapt and we evolve.

We do not want people working for us simply because it’s a job, and for
that reason we try to hire people from our volunteer base. Working for Sea
Shepherd is not a nine to five, forty hour week routine. We look for
passion, for imagination and resourcefulness.

We also need to be accessible to our supporters and open to their ideas
and criticisms.

Sea Shepherd must make it a priority to build on our onshore crew of
volunteers. It is these volunteers that bring to us the support base that we
need in order for the shipboard volunteers to be able to efficiently do what
needs to be done on the high seas. In fact, there is really no difference
between being a volunteer on land or on the ships. Both areas of volunteer
activism are equally important and perfectly complement each other.

We are presently undertaking campaigns in the Galapagos (Ecuador) Taiji
Japan (dolphins) The Faeroe Islands (pilot whales), the Southern Ocean
(whales), Namibia (seals), the Mediterranean (bluefin tuna), Norway and
Iceland, (whales). We are also making plans to defend sharks in the Southern
Pacific and to address the problem of the growing Pacific plastic gyre.

As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

To this end, we have made several major changes within the society`s
administrative structure. We will be increasing the number of members on our
Board of Directors to allow us to continue to harness fresh ideas and new
energy. I will take on the title of Executive Director for Sea Shepherd and
I’ll be appointing an Administrative Director who will reside in Friday
Harbor. There will be no Chief Executive Officer (CEO) role going forward.

Steve Roest, recently our Chief Executive Officer stepped down to take up
the position of SSCS International Business Development Director based in
London, England. Steve is a successful businessman and has strengthened Sea
Shepherd’s resources considerably. There are significant challenges that we
need Steve to address, specifically building support for our efforts in the
Galapagos, Namibia, and in the Mediterranean. Steve also remains our primary
negotiator and liaison with Animal Planet and the Discovery networks.

SSCS Directors Carla Robinson, Alex Earl and Chuck Swift will be leaving
Sea Shepherd. Carla has been with Sea Shepherd for twenty years and under
her guidance our computing system has been built to efficiently handle all
the demands of our supporters and to satisfy the IRS and other government
agencies. Her presence will be deeply missed by Board, staff and volunteers.

Alex Earl has done an excellent job over the last few years building up a
merchandise department to raise money for our campaigns and to promote our
name. He and his wife, former SSCS Executive Director Kim McCoy have been a
strong influence on the society.

Chuck Swift first began with Sea Shepherd in the late 1980`s serving on
campaigns until 1997 where he was both a ship’s officer and the ship’s
manager on the Edward Abbey, Cleveland Amory, and the Ocean Warrior. He left
the organization in 1987 to pursue a business degree and rejoined Sea
Shepherd in 2008 to serve as Captain on the Bob Barker and as deputy CEO for
the society. His tireless efforts on behalf of the oceans have inspired
staff and volunteers alike.

All of us at Sea Shepherd wish Carla, Chuck, Alex and Kim the very best
in their future endeavors knowing they will always continue to work in
defense of the environment and of animals.

Sea Shepherd has been in the vanguard of the international movement to
defend and protect biodiversity in the world’s oceans since the 1970`s. We
are a unique organization, and the only international marine anti-poaching
organization in existence. And we will remain so just so long as we keep
ourselves as an organization that can respond to issues immediately without
being bogged down with red-tape and internal disagreements.

I look forward to a very productive year in 2012 working with our staff,
crew, volunteers and supporters worldwide, doing what we do best and no
other group does at all – aggressive non-violent intervention to shut down
marine poachers. Our campaigns are driven to defend, conserve and protect
all marine species from the smallest of plankton to the largest whale.

Like the sea, Sea Shepherd can never be predictable. We are an
organization of passionate people motivated by deep affection for our
planet, our oceans and for life.

Like the ocean we surge with anger at times and we approach issues calmly
at other times but always we keep our eyes focused on our objectives and our
hands firmly on the helm to keep our course steady and true.

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